Lakeland Historic Preservation Board OKs demo of Cash Feed building

Thursday

Oct 12, 2017 at 10:26 AMOct 13, 2017 at 7:51 AM

Christopher Guinn @cguinnnews

LAKELAND — The once-planned future home of the Catapult 2.0 business incubator is now kaput.

The Lakeland Historic Preservation Board, the arbiter of construction in Lakeland's historic districts, voted 4-to-1 to allow complete demolition of the mission-style building on North Lake Mirror after it sustained structural damage from Hurricane Irma.

The board — appointed by the City Commission but independent from it — went against a city staff recommendation to allow demolition for all but the outer walls, freeing the owner to clear the property to make new plans.

Wesley Beck, the representative of the project owner, the Lakeland Economic Development Council, said the cost to perform the work recommended by the city's professional staff was insurmountable.

The plan to convert the 1924 warehouse into the business recruitment and development group's next incubator and headquarters has been a passion project for two years, Beck said.

But after an engineer determined the hurricane had irreparably damaged its main support structure, restoration became financially infeasible, Beck said.

"As vice chairman of the LEDC and the person responsible for the project, I can't sit in front of the (LEDC) board and give them an idea what this will cost," he said. "If you want to save this building, you would have to stand in front of this building and write checks — and there is no bottom.

As the organization restoring this building,"You cannot vote for an open-ended checkbook," Beck said.

Historic Lakeland Inc., a private advocacy group for Lakeland's architectural history, had asked the board to delay making a decision on the demolition. In a letter to the Historic Preservation Board, Alice Collins, the president of Historic Lakeland, had asked for the opportunity to hire a second engineer to give another opinion.

Buildings of the same era with roughly similar construction methods had been successfully restored, the letter noted.

Historic Preservation Board member Dan Fowler, who had been involved professionally with the Catapult project and thus did not vote on the decision, said by his estimation it would cost about $7 million to completely shore up the building for safe occupancy, a sum more suited for historic properties of national importance.

"It's not palatable to put that kind of money into a building that only has local city significance in my mind," he said.

The demolition was also supported by Community Development Director Jim Studiale, who oversees the Historic Preservation Board's professional staff.

The building wasn't built with the same structural components as others built in the same era, Studiale said, such as the Terrace Hotel.

"It would take a Herculean effort, which is unrealistic," Studiale said.

Lakeland's historic-preservation ordinances do not typically allow demolition, though the board has been known to allow it in cases where a building is too far gone to reasonably restore it. The difficulty in achieving a demolition approval is to prevent owners from buying difficult, historically significant buildings at a fire-sale price and then allowing them to collapse by neglect, freeing what is often well-located land.

Had the board voted against complete demolition, the LEDC would have had to walk away from the property, Beck said, and pursue options elsewhere in the city.

There is no time frame and no set plan for how the LEDC will proceed, Beck told The Ledger.

"We have a lot of questions to answer," Beck said. The popularity of the current Catapult locale, in the basement of the Bank of America building at 331 S. Florida Ave., has created some operational concerns.

"The biggest issue we have is short term," Beck said. "We're out of space.

"Catapult needs a home."

Christopher Guinn can be reached at Christopher.Guinn@theledger.com or 863-802-7592. Follow him on Twitter @CGuinnNews.